Reaping Your Harvest

August 27, 2018

Good day wonderful family, friends, and patrons! We hope everyone is having a pleasant Monday with this hot and humid weather. A sauna has nothing on this heat today as I have shed at least five and a half pounds so far throughout the day. It’s been super crazy busy around the farm as we had some major changes last week. Graham decided to move on and start his life with his new partner. Although it came very sudden to us that he decided to move on, we were able to switch gears to beast mode and re-establish our baselines and routines for our day to day work. Graham was a great asset to the farm while he was here and helped accomplish a ton of projects around the farm. We wish him the best in his future endeavors.

You may be thinking at this point, “Oh no! What about the chicken?” Have no fear, we have already filled the void with two new chicken producers that have now partnered up with our team. Jack and Goodie Bell have acquired the egg mobile business from Graham. Jack and Goodie are neighbors down the road and recently started a 50-acre farm with beef cows and now they will be emulating the Joel Salatin egg mobile method as well. This includes moving the chicken coop behind his grazing beef cows to help spread the manure and sterilize the pasture by scratching the cow patties around and eating the fly larvae out to reduce fly populations. What a great way to mimic nature’s symbiotic relationships using this method!! Secondly, we will be offering whole freedom ranger chickens that are being rotated on pasture and supplemented with Reedy Fork certified organic, non-gmo, soy free broiler feed, produced by Casey Lamb and Casey Harris. If you are not familiar with the differences of meat chicken breeds, the freedom ranger is more of a chicken. Meaning it moves around the pasture freely ranging and eating more food off the land. This is unlike the commercial counterpart, the Cornish Cross, double breasted, white meat chicken that just sits on the ground most of its life waiting for the next feeding. Watching the breeds side by side, I prefer the Freedom Rangers over the Cornish Cross breeds as the Freedom Rangers actually taste more flavorful than the grain filled counterpart. We welcome our new chicken partners and look forward to our new partnerships.

As I am filling y'all in with all the new changes I want to shift directions and talk about what it means to reap your harvests. Yesterday morning I was meandering around the gardens filling a basket with all the wonderful goodies growing out of the ground and I started thinking about how little time I actually take to reap our harvests in our gardens. I felt like I have spent so much time preparing garden beds and planting all kinds of different vegetables, fruit trees and other pants, that I forget about the harvest! I feel like I do this a lot. Even on the livestock side of things, I work so hard every day with the milk cows and very seldom do I sit down and enjoy a huge dollop of cream in my fresh roasted coffee. Then I started thinking about other harvests in my life. What about my family: my wife, my daughter, and my son and other extended family members. Do I take time regularly to reap the benefits of enjoying quality time with my family on a daily and consistent basis? What about the community I live in, do I get to reap the benefits of cultivating long lasting friendships with our neighbors? Whatever was going through my head yesterday morning got me really thinking about how I can arrange my day to be able to stop and appreciate what we are building up around us here on the farm, in our family, in the community, in the Triangle area, and in the state of North Carolina. I believe it’s important for each and every one of us to recognize this for all of our lives and to strike the balance of reaping the harvests from all of our hard work across the board.

That being said, I am making an effort to spend more quality time with Willow so we can start bonding more as she is growing and maturing very rapidly. This week we are beginning a 6 week parent-child gymnastics class one night a week starting Wednesday. I think it will be very good for our blooming father-daughter relationship. I encourage you all to find ways to reap the harvests in your lives with your family members.

We really appreciate the continued support and patronage from all of y'all reading this newsletter today. To be able to show our love and gratefulness to you all, I want to remind everyone about our 2nd Annual Fall Festival here at Nature’s Roots Farm on Saturday, October 13, 2018. This will be an all-day event with various workshops starting at 10:00 am. The brick oven will be rolling and I will be cranking out amazing pizza pies at lunch, a farm tour starting at 2 pm, and then live bluegrass music though the evening. We have an awesome lineup this year so far with world class talent coming to our stage. Check out the website for the event details and be sure to register through the following link so that we can have a proper head count. I will be seeing all of the customers ordering this week as I will be completing the delivery this Thursday!